Balthasar at the Center
The funny thing is that the most radically opposed claims made by both Hart and Lewis can be found in almost identical form being affirmed by Balthasar. For Balthasar, as for Lewis, the interval of Holy Saturday is a real interval in the life of the Trinity. The suffering and death of Christ are events in the very life of God. Conversely, for Balthasar as for Hart, God is always-already replete in God’s Trinitarian plenitude and kenosis which enfolds and grounds God’s economic activity in the world. The infinite distance and difference between the Triune persons is the holy distance into which the unholy distance of sin is transposed and apocalyptically consumed in the ardor of God’s holy fire, God’s inexhaustible life of Love. For Balthasar, God’s being does indeed include economic events, even events as radical as suffering, death, and godforsakenness. When Christ suffers and dies, we behold the true and real suffering and death of God. However God’s being is not overcome or determined by these events precisely because of the intensity of the eternal life of Trinitarian self-giving, God’s primal kenosis. The Triune life of infinite distance and freedom is not delimited or determined by its free taking of sin and death into itself. The Triune God freely and openly allows the reality of sin, death, and nothingness a true and real interruption into the divine life, as witnessed on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, and just so enfolds it, timefully into the replete, inexhaustible plenitude of God’s life. Here Balthasar is able, beautifully, to affirm the positive claims of Hart and Lewis without being sucked into affirming the oppositional logic that seems to separate their positions. As such, it seems that Balthasar represents a site where the radical and beautiful theologies represented by Hart and Lewis could come to an even more radical rapprochement.
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Chris Donato:
August 29th, 2008 at 6:56 am
So, then, Balthasar is the continuum.
Still, it’s very hard for me to get my mind wrapped around the death of God in the cross of Christ. I often find myself nodding in agreement with likes of Lewis and, for example, Bauckham’s God Crucifed, but then I read Hart and find myself, well, feeling a bit more settled. Maybe that’s the beauty of the “radical rapproachement” of which you speak.
Evan:
August 29th, 2008 at 7:31 am
I’d agree with you completely, Halden. As I read Mysterium Paschale I was constantly struck by the fact that Balthasar was effectively creating a synthesis of the theologia gloriae and the theologia crucis in his exposition of Holy Saturday. At the time I had thought of it in terms of the ecumenical implications for the doctrine of justification, but I think that the connection between Hart and Lewis makes much the same point.
Tony:
August 29th, 2008 at 7:57 am
I was almost tempted to quote Scripture in summarizing your wonderful piece, Halden: “what God has put together, let no man put asunder.” Not that Balthasar takes the place of God!!! But, imitating the witness of Scripture itself, good theology I guess must try to maintain a lively and creative tension between and among different perspectives, perspectives that, in any case, find their true synthesis only in the personal and concrete universal, Jesus Christ himself.
Chris Donato:
August 29th, 2008 at 8:24 am
As an aside (and for precision’s sake), theologia gloriae, at least in Lutheran thought from which it has entered into common, Protestant discourse, is contrasted with theologia crucis in the sense that the latter is the precise point where God and his salvation is revealed, whereas the former places greater emphasis on natural revelation and human experience / reason.
To oversimplify it even further, it’s the difference between human inability and human ability.
Evan:
August 29th, 2008 at 9:50 am
I wouldn’t associate the theologie gloriae with an emphasis on natural revelation/experience/reason so much as with where revelation is identified. In the Heidelberg Disputation Luther associates it with Philip’s asking Christ to show the Father, without realizing that the Father is perceived through the Crucified Son. Luther goes on to say in the next thesis, “He who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering. Therefore he prefers… glory to the cross”. The point isn’t so much about human inability or ability (although this aspect of the question is obviously always present) as it is about how God reveals Himself.
Balthasar seeks to recognize the centrality of glory for the vision of God, but identifies it- with Luther- in the cross. Rather than a theology of glory whereby the theologian prefers “glory to the cross”, Balthasar finds “glory in the cross”. This especially comes out towards the end of his second chapter:
“Once we realised that even the most extreme Kenosis, inasmuch as it is a possibility in the eternal love of God, is englobed in that love which takes responsibility for it, then the opposition between a theologia crucis and a theologia gloriae is fundamentally overcome – even though those two may not dissolve the one into the other.”
He continues with a quote from Barth,
“A theologia gloriae, celebrating what Jesus Christ in his Resurrection, received for us, and what he is for us as the Risen One, would have no meaning unless it also contained in itself the theologia crucis: the praise of what he has done for us in his death and of what he is for us as the crucified. But no more would an abstract theologia crucis have meaning. One cannot celebrate in proper fashion the passion and death of Jesus Christ, if this praise does not already contain in itself the theologia gloriae: the praise of him who, in his Resurrection, receives our justice and our life, the One who rose for us from among the dead.”
(p.82)
Halden:
August 29th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Chris, the settledness you speak of in your first comment is exactly why, at the end of the day I have a bit more sympathy for Lewis than Hart. What I love about Lewis and the school of thought he represents is the willingness to let the gospel be unsettling, surprising, and subversive ever and again. I think we cannot do without that in our attempts to do theology.
Chris Donato:
August 29th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
@Halden: I would agree that we can’t do without it. Each and every time I’m confronted with the subversive, unsettling aspects of the gospel my faith is strengthened. I supposed, though, that every Paul has to have his James.
@Evan: Well said. I’ve not been saturated with either Balthasar or Barth, so I wasn’t exactly sure on where they were coming from in their “emendations” re: theologia gloriae. I like it, and it seems to me from what I’ve read in Wright (JVG, etc.), Bauckham, et al., that they’re following this same trajectory.
I think it’s absolutely right to associate gloriae / crucis with where revelation is identified. That’s really what I was thinking in that the former locates revelation somewhere else other than the cross, which, to Luther’s mind at least, meant missing it altogether:
“In that it is God who is made known in the passion and cross of Christ, it is revelation; in that this revelation can only be discerned by the eye of faith, it is concealed. The ‘friends of the cross’ know that beneath the humility and shame of the cross lie concealed the power and glory of God — but to others, this insight is denied (McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross 149–150).
Lurking in the above, incidentally, is the inability of those not ‘friends of the cross’ by faith to see the God hidden in suffering.